DevLog: May 2017 - Ship Roles and Armour

[Cornflakes_91]

It uses my own custom game engine that has been written from scratch.

Stuart I've seen your videos and your engine is impressive, moving thousands of ships around hundreds of systems at stable fps, what you think about games like Stellaris from great studios like Paradox, a game with a fps drop in galaxy view on mid game and horrible fps at fights in mid-late game? Why game studios don't launch smooth games like you are doing with Galaxial?

because paradox has an engine they've used and updated for ages, and didnt start with a clean slate. an engine that wasnt built for lots of objects doing real time fighting but for non-representation of abstracted tokens moving around (aka this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOAzYdjnSn4) and also that theres a lot more going on in stellaris besides graphics. theres also the small detail that 3d graphics still need a fair chunk more processing than 2d graphics.

not to say that paradox couldnt do better, or that stuart is bad.
just dont be so fast to belittle established developers for not being able to match a purpose built engine running an incomplete game.
(from a developer who works alone and thus can implement changes far faster and easier than a studio like paradox)

[StuartMorgan]

Stuart I've seen your videos and your engine is impressive, moving thousands of ships around hundreds of systems at stable fps, what you think about games like Stellaris from great studios like Paradox, a game with a fps drop in galaxy view on mid game and horrible fps at fights in mid-late game? Why game studios don't launch smooth games like you are doing with Galaxial?

It's hard to know the exact cause of any slowdowns without profiling the code. There are so many things to keep track of as the game goes on... Paradox games have a huge amount of events using their own scripting language, so checking most of these against all countries/planets/characters every few days could be one of the bottlenecks. CPU intensive simulation games inevitably come across late game lag or stuttering, so it is something I will need to be aware of and keep under control also.

The engine for Galaxial is custom built written entirely in C++ with heavy emphasis on multi-threading. There are still some features to add which could lower performance once the game is finished, but I'm fairly confident I can keep it running stable.

because paradox has an engine they've used and updated for ages, and didn't start with a clean slate. an engine that wasnt built for lots of objects doing real time fighting but for non-representation of abstracted tokens moving around
(from a developer who works alone and thus can implement changes far faster and easier than a studio like paradox)

Pretty much this.
Personally I'm a big fan of their games and really impressed they've managed to use the same underlying engine (overhauled multiple times...) for Victoria, Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron and Stellaris, which are some of my all time favorites and inspiration for Galaxial.

[TuriusRay]

Thanks for the replies guys